ORUCC has a diverse team focused on how we can safely be an active and faithful church during the COVID pandemic.

The COVID Response Team includes physicians, researchers, nurses, public health experts, and lawyers as well as pastors, moderators, and other lay members. To aid in church planning, this group meets at the request of the senior pastor to evaluate the current state of the pandemic, to look ahead a few months, and to help discern how to best put the recommendations into practice.

We are proud of how we have navigated the pandemic, always seeking to provide a virtual way to worship and to remain community at the times when we haven’t been able to gather in person.  As a community that seeks to protect the most vulnerable among us, we have been doing our best to shift and change with the tides of COVID. We now have the ease of live-streamed worship from the Worship Hall at 10 am, so you may choose to participate in worship either which can be viewed in person or from home.

We understand and affirm that many will want to worship remotely so we will continue to strive for an inclusive virtual experience.

If you are experiencing any symptoms or feeling under the weather, we kindly ask you to join us virtually. If you do test positive for COVID after being with us, please share this news with us as soon as you can.

Thank you for your cooperation and help as we aim to keep each other healthy and safe.

As long as the Dane County COVID risk remains low, masking is optional in our building. Others’ decisions to mask or avoid close contact should be respected. We may return to masking for worship if disease risk rises.

Small groups that use the church outside of the worship service may make the best determination for their group.

In our deliberations, we value the advice offered by the Wisconsin Council of Churches. Their recommendations are developed in consultation with public health experts and provides faith-grounded guidance to churches like ours. We also carefully monitor public health statistics for Dane County, looking especially at the trends in new cases and the current occupancy of the county’s ICUs. Additionally, we rely on members of the COVID Response Team to bring their own “from the clinic” perspectives to our discussions.